Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy

Dick Hill gives just the everyman kind of reading to make Nobel Prize–winning economist Stiglitz's analysis of the financial collapse plainly comprehensible and a ripping good—if enraging—yarn. With harsh words for the right and the left, Reagan-era deregulations that set the stage for the catastrophe, the Fed's bungling, the high costs of the Iraq War, and President Obama's refusal to take stronger measures, Stiglitz is passionate and iconoclastic. Hill handles the financial intricacies with clarity and delivers the material with warmth, urgency, and erudition. A Norton hardcover. (Feb.)